DCF Full Spectrum; Does It Bridge The Gap Between RGB And The Eye? Page 2

There are two other presets and a manual setting offered, the presets being
Portrait and Vivid, and the manual controls, a set of sliding bars in color
ranges, something called Spotlight and Fill. The "Vivid" preset
brings in a saturation and contrast kicker, and the "Portrait" preset
proffers a "flatter" version (lower contrast and saturation). Spotlight
and Fill sliders behave like the Shadow/Highlight control in Photoshop. The
manual controls allow you to mess around with the color and contrast in ways
that can be worked in Photoshop, but doing so in Photoshop still remains within
the RGB model, so, according to TIL, the changes will still not yield full color
fidelity.

As you work on the sliders or in Full Spectrum a smallish preview window shows
the changes. The window might show some banding, but this is not what will happen
in application to the image; it's simply that the preview is at 5 bit.
Getting a larger preview window would help, but here you are not dealing with
sharpening, but color, and you can see the difference in the window provided.
I worked in a dupe layer to see the before and after, and in many cases was
able to work the sliders to gain a more pleasing color effect. But I was using
it for color control, not for color correction, but that's something that
will become tempting once you begin to see what the controls allow.

In all, DCF Full Spectrum offers an intriguing approach to color, one that
is device independent so that it can be used on any RGB image, photographed
or scanned. With certain photographs (depending on color) the effect is subtle
at best. But if you do a setup with greens and purples and then place the uncorrected
next to the corrected image on the monitor, you will see the effect. If enhanced
color fidelity in the green, blue, and purple range is your desire, the DCF
plug-in seems to do the trick.